Bush-Cheney 9/11 Interview Won't Be Formally Recorded

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and PHILIP SHENON

Published: April 28, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 27 — The White House said on Tuesday that there would be no recording or formal transcription of the historic joint interview of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The interview, to begin at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday at the White House, will be recorded by two note takers, one from the White House. Under a pact with the White House that allowed all its 10 members in the interview, the commission is permitted to take a note taker, but not a recording device. The panel said it did not press for a formal transcription of the session, letting the White House decide.

The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the session would not be officially transcribed because the White House considered it a "private meeting" that would include highly classified information.

"Let's keep in mind that it is extraordinary for a sitting president of the United States to sit down with a legislatively created commission," Mr. McClellan said.

An adviser to Mr. Bush said a larger consideration was the concern that an official transcript would set a precedent for appearances by presidents before other commissions and create legal problems down the road.

Mr. Bush will not be under oath, and the White House has been adamant that what he says should not be considered official testimony.

"He is not testifying, he is talking to them," the adviser said. "A transcript implies testimony. This would open a Pandora's box of all sorts of precedent-setting and legal issues. We were reluctant for the president to do this, anyway."

Legal scholars said the lack of an official transcript would give the White House some deniability and make it more difficult to use the president's words as evidence in a future suit against the government.

"It gives them more maneuverability in case someone slips up or says something he regrets," Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have cleared much of their schedules to be ready for the session. Mr. Bush has prepared with Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, as well as with the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, who will sit in on the interview. Mr. Cheney's office declined to give details of his preparations. White House officials would not say whether Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney had prepared together.

Commission members say they believe that they are under no formal time limit for the interview. Although the White House had offered one hour each for interviews of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, they dropped that as part of an accord in which the president and vice president could be interviewed together.

The panel chairman, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, said White House officials had not told him that the questioning would have to be cut off at a specific time.

"The only thing they've told me so far," Mr. Kean said in an interview last week, "is to please respect the fact that this is the president of the United States, and I'm sure members of the commission will do that."

Former Representative Timothy J. Roemer, a Democrat on the panel, said: "I believe that it is very important that we get all 10 commissioners in the process. We should make sure that all 10 commissioners have ample opportunity to ask questions. I certainly have a lot of questions and probably not a lot of time to ask them."

Mr. Roemer noted that "we were able to get about four hours with former President Bill Clinton and three" with former Vice President Al Gore and that Bob Woodward spoke more than three hours with Mr. Bush for his Iraq war book.

"I don't know that the metric should be what Bob Woodward got on the Iraq war," Mr. Roemer said. "But certainly the seriousness of 3,000 people dying on 9/11 would suggest that we need ample time."

Mr. Kean said the panel would focus on Sept. 11, but he would not be more specific. Members have said they want to know about interactions among Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other officials on Sept. 11 and, specifically, when Mr. Bush issued an order letting military pilots down civilian airliners. The commission is investigating whether the order was relayed quickly to fighter pilots who might have had a chance to shoot an American Airlines jet before it struck the Pentagon.

Mr. Roemer said he wanted "to know about the sense of urgency in the administration in the summer" in dealing with a flood of reports about terrorist threats, "the time period when alarm bells were going off and people's hair was supposed to be on fire." He said testimony to the panel suggested that many people in the administration paid too little attention to terrorism that summer.

Mr. Kean said he was humbled to be part of the session. "This is real history," he said. "Presidents just don't do this. Presidents don't meet with commissions like this."

Mr. Kean added that the panel had no ground rules but was asking its staff to prepare essential questions.